Joey, I finally figured out what caused the screen garbeling. I had the following setting somewhere in the preseed file: debconf debconf/frontend select Dialog It did not catch my attention at first because it seems to be a debconf setting and not a d-i one. It entered the preseed file because I used the output of debconf-get-selections to start off with. I am quite sure that it was in that output. Shouldn't this be documented in the manual (in chapter 4.7.1)?
In the maillist I read a thread in which you explain how to make a modular preseed file, very nice! I tried this using your examples and it leads to a bit strange behaviour. This is the scenario: The main preseed file: installer.cfg is retrieved via the kernel command line: preseed/url=http://vivaldi/d-i/preseed.cfg it contains a line like this: d-i preseed/include_command string echo "hosts/`cat /etc/hostname`.cfg" A preseed file with the name <hostname>.cfg is found at http://vivaldi/d-i/hosts, so far so good. Now this <hostname>.cfg contains the following line: d-i preseed/include string seeds/disk-hda.cfg seeds/part-single.cfg seeds/grub-one-os.cfg At this point the installer looks at the url: http://vivaldi/d-i/hosts/seeds, I instead expected (and want) it to look at http://vivaldi/d-i/seeds, as that is the place where the files are stored! I worked around it placing a symlink in http://vivaldi/d-i/hosts to the seeds directory. Is there a clean way to specify the line d-i preseed/include string seeds/disk-hda.cfg seeds/part-single.cfg seeds/grub-one-os.cfg in another way so that the files are fetched correctly from http://vivaldi/d-i/seeds ? Kees.